Somehow, It's Still Possible to Surprise Andrew Zimmern

Andrew Zimmern has eaten spoiled shark meat in New Zealand, horse rectum in Kazakhstan, and jerk pig head in Jamaica. After 10 years traveling through foreign countries for the Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods, it's hard to picture anything, whether pulled from a carcass, the sea floor, or the soil, fazing the seemingly unfazable chef.

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For Bizarre Food's eleventh year on the Travel Channel, which premiers January 31, Zimmern focused more on journeys and stories—specifically American stories—in addition to strange food. He retraced unequivocally American paths, like Route 66, collecting stories from hidden pockets of people around the country: like those of the tribal fisherman who introduced Lewis and Clarke to salmon so they could survive their crossing of the continent.

"When you marry a historically important, factual journey from one place to another, and you discover what there is along the way that echoes that story and that history and that journey, you then have what I believe to be much more powerful storytelling," Zimmern says. And America surprised him.

Zimmern talked to Esquire about food advocacy, politics, and bizarre food, and what we learn from the people who eat it.

Andrew Zimmern checks out handcrafts made by the descendants of the same tribes Lewis and Clark met along their journey down the Columbia River.

Travel Channel

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Zimmern wanted this season to be different, so he decided to focus on his home country.

My mission is not to make a show that's about a fat white guy that goes around the world to cook. My mission is to use this cultural learning—it's what I call "adventure learning"—to help solve problems. The problem that we always try to solve with the show is this notion that the world needs more patience, tolerance, and understanding with each other. And if I could pick one place on Earth where people need more patience, tolerance, and understanding with each other, it's America in 2017.

So I was gung-ho about keeping it domestic—although we are doing a Cuba episode. I think it's extremely important right now for people in our country to see that there's a whole world within our own history and background that shows us to be a nation of immigrants, embracing commonality as Americans about the good things we share and not about the things that have been dividing us historically—and when I say historically, I'm including 2016.

"If I could pick one place on Earth where people need more patience, tolerance, and understanding with each other, it's America in 2017."

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Even in America, it's easy to find "bizarre food," as Zimmern's journey on the Lewis and Clark trail showed.

To be with the native peoples up there and taste the salt-dried Pacific lamprey that they fed themselves with—a horrific sea critter that looks like an eel with a big open mouth—I mean, it looks like something out of the movie Alien. They were able to render them delicious simply by smoking and drying them, and then you have to pound them to release the meat from the skin. It's essentially an inedible animal that they turned into a major food source that was phenomenal.

I think the quote I'm probably most famous for in that arena is: "Don't practice contempt prior to investigation when it comes to people." Just because someone has different-colored skin, different taste in music, different spiritual system, different sexuality concept, whatever it is, we get bogged down in differences, and we pre-judge people.

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I was in Louisiana, and I posted a picture doing a roast with some Cajun people who are living in very remote isolation. They used every part of the pig, and one of the things they do in Cajun country is they make this hog pot: They take the stomach and clean it, and then they stuff it with sausage, and then they smoke it and pan fry it, and then they braise it for four or five hours and slice it to serve. And it is, I mean, one of the most delicious things anyone could ever taste. And when I popped up the picture of the pig's stomach on there, everyone on my Instagram was like, "Ohhhh disgusting." But the finished product, everyone was like, "Oh my god, that looks so fucking delicious, it's unbelievable." And I reminded everybody that this is why we don't pre-judge things. You know, trust that other people with experience in these cultures are able to teach us something about the world. If everybody could eat the stomach of certain animals and find a use for it, that's X number of millions and millions of meals per year that otherwise wind up in the garbage can. And I think with 25 percent of Americans food insecure and 40 percent of food wasted in this country, we're ignoring our civic responsibility by living in an unsustainable food system.

We were on the Mississippi River—we did sort of a Huck Finn show going down the Mississippi—and I met a fisherman who barely makes a living hand-hauling lines by himself and hoop-catching a fish called a buffalo fish. Now, you know all about the notion of garbage fish and by-catch and all these other empty buzzwords, but here's the fish that is in extraordinary numbers, that has an incredible amount of edible flesh on its body, that comes from a healthy part of our own river, that's in almost limitless supply, that grows quickly, and is one of the most delicious white fleshed, clean fishes I've ever eaten in my life, and nobody eats it. And the reason nobody eats it is that historically it was the food of the poorest of the poor, including African-Americans living in small pockets along the Mississippi River. So everywhere we went, people would say, "Oh no, we don't eat that. That's not food of our culture." Well, you better start making it food of your culture so that we're not starving.

I mean, look, food can become a job build, it can become an economic development program. If they started processing buffalo fish and selling it around the country, they would put hundreds of families to work. They would create an economic hub in a state, Mississippi, that is very much in need of that kind of help. The solution is through food.

He advocates against these issues—food waste, hunger—outside the platform of Bizarre Foods, too.

I've been given such a large platform, and if I don't do good things with it, I am spitting in the face of the czar of the universe. I get very frustrated with other people in the food world who are not using their lofty perch for social justice advocacy. There are people all around me, all around you, who are living in shame about their hunger security issues. We're killing off our planet. I believe that there is a whole range of issues that chefs and food people are uniquely positioned to tell those stories. So yeah, I love telling them in Bizarre Foods, but I believe in fighting for them outside of my TV life.

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"If everybody could eat the stomach of certain animals, that's X number of millions and millions of meals per year that otherwise wind up in the garbage can."

Which of course creates backlash on social media.

People are like, "I don't like your politics, stick to food" or "I don't like your talking about things other than food, I'm unfollowing you." And I would say to every citizen, including those noisy trolls, I support their right to say whatever they want to say. If someone wants to unfollow me, unfollow me. What makes America great is that the next person with the idea that saves our planet might be you. And everyone's opinion matters. And this is a country founded on the principle that all men and women are created equal. So, if noisy troll X who works at the insurance company in Des Moines, if he wants to tweet about politics or something, God bless him. That's how I learn about my country. I get out on the road I actually talk to those people. I think the people that probably take the most crap about it are me and Tom Colicchio, and there's no one I'd rather be associated with.

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Traveling America has made him feel optimistic about the future.

The people who I'm talking to in Michigan, Mississippi, Louisiana, the Pacific Northwest, Oklahoma, Kansas, they are saying different things and feel differently about our country than what I'm hearing when I go and spend time in New York and LA and Seattle and Miami and Boston.

On the road, I have had the most incredible surprises because the people who I have met who do not see eye-to-eye with me on any civic or cultural issue have become my friends—we can put aside those thoughts and share a meal. I found a whole range of people with whom, when I walked in the door, I was like, "Oh boy," then you break bread and you spend a day with them, and I'm no longer that liberal guy from New York living in Minnesota who's talking about social justice issues. I very much become "this cool new friend of mine who loves to go out and fish or hunt or do whatever and is so kind with my kids." I was reminded about how much love there is for each other in this country. We have to learn to talk to each other and learn to listen to each other. And I think we see that every week on Bizarre Foods. It's the thing that I'm most proud of.

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"What makes America great is that the next person with the idea that saves our planet might be you."

There was a great joke that I heard from someone that lived on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which has a couple hundred thousand people living up there. They're separated from the rest of America by a bridge; there's only one way on and one way off the UP other than boats. He said, "We have a running sort of private joke up here on the UP that if the bridge ever fell into Lake Superior, the other 300 million Americans would be cut off from society." And I laughed, and then I realized how much truth there was to that, because the people up there in many ways are living a life—you know, they have cable TV and electricity—much like their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Everything's about family, everything's about community, everything's shared, people check on each other and live in a communal way that is much more recognizable to someone living in 1917 than in 2017.

He believes that staying close to home made for the best season ever.

I believe very strongly that if you want to send a message out to the world, you better do it wrapped up in a donut and a laugh. Our show is still our show. I think it's our best season that we've ever made visually, technically—the editing and videography is stunning. I think we've done our best work, and I think people are gonna absolutely explode with joy when they see the stories and the foods that we're able to bring them.